Berkeley, CA —The University of California Information Technology Leadership Council has announced that ESnet’s On-Demand Secure Circuits and Reservation System (OSCARS) was selected for honorable mention in the 2011 Larry L. Sautter Award Program.

The Larry L. Sautter Award was established in 2000 to encourage and recognize innovative deployment of information technology in support of the University of California's mission of teaching, research, public service and patient care. The Sautter Award honors projects developed by faculty and staff in any department at the 10 UC campuses, the UC Office of the President (UCOP), and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

“ESnet is proud to receive this recognition on behalf of OSCARS,” said Steve Cotter, Head of ESnet at Berkeley Lab. “The increasingly data intensive nature of next‐generation research in areas including high‐energy physics, climate change, genomics and other fields is challenging the capacity of the scientific networks that support universities and research institutions. ESnet developed OSCARS to meet that challenge, providing UC scientists and their collaborators the ability to provision circuits that guarantee a level of performance that cannot be achieved over traditional networks.”

“OSCARS creates a ready framework for translating innovative network research into wide deployment and production use." said Chin Guok, project lead for OSCARS. "Since its inception, OSCARS development has been open-sourced to the greater technical community. Groups at universities around California, notably UC Davis, and the world are developing specialized OSCARS applications for their networks that can potentially improve efficiency for networks supporting scientific research.”

The Sautter award will be presented on August 8, 2011 at the UC Computing Services Conference held at UC Merced.

About OSCARS

OSCARS allows user applications to reserve guaranteed network bandwidth in advance and offers reliable end-to-end throughput, and quality of service in managing time-sensitive and large data sets. OSCARS allows users to automatically create temporary virtual circuits to route large data sets across multiple connecting networks managed by different organizations.

OSCARS development was funded by the DOE's Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research. OSCARS supports multiple vendors and platforms. To date, OSCARS-managed and provisioned circuits carry around 5 petabytes of science data traffic a month, comprising more than half of ESnet’s total network traffic. Currently, OSCARS is the most widely deployed software of its kind in production use and is used daily by research and education networks including Internet2, USLHCnet, Nordic network NORDUnet, and Brazil’s RNP. OSCARS is also interoperable with other virtual circuit software in use in Europe and Asia.

About Berkeley Lab

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 12 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more, visit: http://www.lbl.gov